To Here Knows When: A Last Moment with Loveless

A My Bloody Valentine fan comes to terms with the follow-up to a perfect record.

Saturday night around 10 p.m., Kevin Shields, the creative force behind My Bloody Valentine, said whatever final prayers he had to say, swallowed his last lingering doubts, and relinquished to the world the follow-up to 1991’s Loveless, his last studio album, and for many, his artistic last will and testament. m b v hit the internet like a hot chunk of meteorite landing in the backyard of a dwindling party. Everyone froze, our lawn chairs tucked stupidly under our arms and our fingers hooking half-filled cups, gazing numbly at the foreign object that had disrupted our tableau. Inside of me a crazed voice cried out something ignoble: “Jesus, Kevin, we’re going to do this now? Twenty-two years, and you couldn’t fucking wait until Tuesday?” Wait, wait; I wasn't ready.

Nevertheless, I heeded the call. I dutifully dropped my stuff, sat down at my computer, and logged into the store. I entered my credit card information and was charged $16 for nine mp3 files. Scanning my Twitter feed, I saw a lot of jokes about the gall of charging $16 for mp3s. As the files made their final transfer from the ether of impossibility into my iTunes, I felt a tug of something like sadness. There they sat, glowing unremarkably, just like the other 26,861 files in my iTunes library. I found that I was profoundly reluctant to listen. The moment I did, one of the richest mysteries of my listening life -- “What would the follow-up to Loveless sound like?” -- would instantly be erased. Once I clicked play, that was it. I would never not know the answer to that question again.

More than the unlikely return of David Bowie, the heartening reappearance of Jeff Mangum, or the release of Brian Wilson's original Smile, m b v’s appearance in the world triggered the tiny, superstitious part of my brain, the one that nervously pleads, “Shouldn’t we have just left that genie in the bottle?” Loveless is a perfect thing. The Romantic myth of the project that nearly wrecked its creator had accumulated around the album's legend, so that by the time people like me got to it (I was in college), its reputation was firmly established. Loveless was a landmark album, but it was also a fragment of a ruined civilization, a torn-off corner of some irretrievable map. It is a placeless album, an album you can never imagine being made. Listening to it, accordingly, has never given me a sense of who I am in the world, or helped me understand how sounds move in it. Instead, listening to it made me feel like I’d donned a high-tech suit, plunged myself into the ocean, and conducted rudimentary communications with dolphins. Few albums have inspired such religious devotion, in part because we worship that which we do not understand, and Loveless is majestically incomprehensible.

Jonathan Lethem, in a short essay he wrote for the literary magazine Black Clock in 2004, asked us to conduct a thought experiment: What sort of music might Otis Redding have made in the wake of “Dock of the Bay”, had he not died in a plane crash just before the song’s release? History tells us that he had recently become obsessed with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and that it could have triggered a similar leap in his capacity as an artist. What would that have sounded like? Maybe it would have been world-changing. Maybe it would been some wretched hippie-era indulgence. “Dock of the Bay” is our single keyhole glimpse, and this knowledge is bound into the fabric of the song’s existence. My mother, not usually one for trivia, informed me of this one day when she turned it up "Dock of the Bay" on the oldies station in the car to sing along. "He died right after making this, you know. So sad."

Kevin Shields didn't die, of course, and it would be indecent to push that parallel any further. But there is something of that same uncanniness to Loveless, a sense that it was a glimpse of some Beyond that wouldn't necessarily be back for a repeat viewing. It felt like it was enough for anybody’s life’s work, enough for anybody’s life. Loveless was enough.

Or so the voice said in my head as I gazed with ambivalence at those nine files. Stalling, I checked my Twitter feed again, and saw that it was oddly silent. Twenty-two years is a long, long time, enough to have commanded a certain awe in the fidgety workings of the internet’s central nervous system. My brain, on autopilot, proposed a glib tweet (“This new MBV album is the best! Can’t wait for the next one!”) and I smacked it down, disgustedly. I thought for a moment about how long it took for Shields to make this music, and then how much longer it took him to make peace with it, to accept whatever imperfections he still heard. I considered how many years I had listened to Loveless, cherishing the vague notion of what Shields might be working on at that moment, wondering if I would ever hear it. How sad and wonderful, I thought, for a dream this dear and long-deferred to be realized. I savored my last moment alone with Loveless. Then I clicked play.